by Ali Shaw
The silver whisperers pressed their crooked lips to Adrien’s ears, and their whispers were rough kisses against his skin. Tears dashed down his cheeks, while his veins felt stiff with fear and the pool even colder than a moment before and his legs almost numb below the knees. An ache developed between each of his fingers. A pain like a stitch underlined his every rib. He shut his eyes and wished with all his heart that Michelle would turn away from Roland and look to Hannah for how to live in the woods, and that Hannah would find her love for it again and in doing so be there for Seb, and that Seb would not be heartbroken because Hiroko would still be alive.
When next he tried to move his feet they were too numb. All he could feel was a strange sensation of flowing water, as if it were moving in between his leg bones. Adrien had never been able to remember how many ribs a man had, but he seemed to have double the number he was used to. His spine felt misaligned, as if his shoulder blades were the two ends of a broken zip.
He opened his eyes and looked down, and felt very tall. His arms appeared stretched, and the veins of his hands were bulging. Then, with less pain than the prick of a needle, the end of one ruptured. It was not blood that flowed out but a shoot, a worm-sized stalk with a tiny leaf already growing from the end of it. When Adrien tried to shout his lungs were soundless hollows, and he blinked and there were flakes of green among his eyelashes. He reached up an arm to brush them away, but his elbow creaked and would not bend far enough. He tried to move one of his other arms and in that moment realised he had at least three.
Hanging like a cape around him, else staring up from where they swarmed on the surface of the pool, were the whisperers. Their faces were eerie and haggard, full of warts and varnished blisters, but as Adrien stared at them their warts all split. Their blisters burst and from beneath them opened pallid flowers, tinged green by the luminescence. Every wooden face filled up with petals, and then with a lisping crescendo they all blew free. Adrien tried to watch them swirl but he could not. It was becoming too hard to focus. His eyes were fixed and drying out.
He had forgotten what it was to be cold. He had forgotten the quantity of his arms and legs. Each of his thoughts was a sycamore seed, spinning lonely in the air. The last few things he remembered, as if they were the only memories permissible, were the faces of Hannah, Hiroko, Seb and Michelle. But he also knew, at last, what it was the whisperers had been saying, all this time, and it was the silver ones at his ears who whispered it the loudest.
Grow.
With a rhyming creak, and with at least two dozen wooden arms, he reached up for the dangling roots of his throne.
18
Wolves
Seb squealed as the kettle water seethed onto his wounded ankle. He screamed and kicked with his other leg and arched his back in agony, but Leonard only kept the water flowing steady. The sun, climbing higher above the chapel, cast the big man’s shadow over his prey. He moved the kettle with engrossed precision, so that a scalding hot ribbon traced its way up Seb’s shin and onto his knee. Here Leonard let the water pour a moment longer, so that it pattered onto the kneecap. Seb screeched and sobbed and tried to kick his bound leg to no avail.
‘Got to make sure there’s still enough,’ said Leonard, moving the water again, letting it hiss against the denim along Seb’s thigh, ‘for you to have a nice refreshing drink at the end of it.’
The brick hit him where his beard met his jaw. Leonard grunted and staggered sideways, the arc of water swerving off its course. It was the brick that had killed his Alsatian, and it clunked now to the floor and rolled to a halt beneath a pew. Hannah had flung it with both hands, swinging it through the air with all the strength she had, but she knew she couldn’t stop there.
With a howl of agony, she threw herself up onto damaged feet and bowled into Leonard to knock him to the floor. She crashed down on top of him, and he punched her hard in the ribs and she barely felt it. Adrenalin had set her alight, and filled her tied-up fists with the fire she needed to hammer them hard against Leonard’s head. He hit her again and she rocked sideways, and one of his hands grappled at her face and she bit it. She could feel her blood rushing through every vein in her body, and slicking red her hands where it flowed from the cuts in her wrists. Leonard was clubbing her hard, but she pushed, pushed down between his blows to seize hold of his throat. He would not murder her son. If another member of her family had to die, it had better be her next in line. Leonard hit her again, throwing her off balance, but she clung on to his neck because Seb’s life depended on it, and she did not care if her own was lost in saving it.
She pushed her thumbs deep, into the soft spots on either side of his oesophagus. When next Leonard struck her it was with less force, and less direction. She leaned all of her weight into her thumbs, and knew he was flagging because his face turned darker and his eyes widened and rolled back beneath his glasses. Knowing she would burn out at any moment, she put everything she had left into her thumbs. She could feel the gristle of his windpipe in her grasp, and she did not let go. Leonard made a strange noise like toads sometimes make. He tried, one last time, to throw her aside, but she had anchored herself with hatred, and with fear for her son, and with the loss of her brother and her mother and her father too, and she was gasping for breath and hot with blood and sweat, all because of monsters like this one. His final two blows knocked against her head and made her skull pound like a drum, but still she held on. She put everything she had into her thumbs. It mattered too much to let go.
Leonard stilled.
His eyes closed and his shoulders sank against the chapel floor.
His face had filled up purple, and perhaps it was that change that made Hannah notice its details. Faint freckles on the sides of his nose. An eyelash stuck to the lens of his glasses. His beard was soft and fine against her fingers in a way she’d never have thought, but that only made her think of Zach, and the struggle she’d had to try to close her brother’s eyes after she had found him, and in the end she had been too overcome and Hiroko had done it for her.
She would not be overcome this time.
‘Mum,’ wheezed Seb, from where he lay snared behind her. ‘Mum, you have to stop.’
‘No, Seb. I mustn’t.’
An impatient fly had arrived and was buzzing at Hannah’s ear. ‘Mum!’ gasped Seb, again, but still she clung on.
The fly kept buzzing, bouncing against her nostril as it zoomed its figure-of-eight around her head. Hannah ignored it and held on to Leonard, but when she next felt something brush her face it was not the insect but feathers, and the air filled with a sudden squabble. She looked up in surprise to see sparrows swerving back and forth from wall to wall, shrieking at her with every pass. Yet the moment she let them distract her she thought she felt the pulse in Leonard’s artery and restored her attention to the task in hand. Even when she heard a padded thump against the stone floor she did not look up, and it took a second thump and a third to draw her attention.
Three hares sat equidistant from each other in the entrance to the chapel. Their ears were flat against their skulls and their feet were drumming an urgent beat against the overgrown flagstones. They had amber irises and deep black pupils, and all three of their gazes were fixed on Hannah. In surprise, she lessened her hold on Leonard’s neck. At once he drew a pitiful, rattling breath, and she clamped her hands back round his throat again.
‘Mum, please . . .’ begged Seb very softly.
Tears dashed down Hannah’s cheeks. She could feel their heat where they welled on her chin.
‘No,’ she said. She had no room in her thoughts for what the hares were doing here. She put all of the force she had left into her thumbs.
As she squeezed the remaining life out of him, some of her tears dropped onto Leonard’s cheeks and forehead. They were not for his sake. They were for her own. Leonard would be in her head when this was over, just as the gunman was there already. She doubted she could cope with both of their ghosts inside her, but nevertheless she hel
d on. It was for Seb that she did this. For everyone.
Then, from somewhere nearby in the woods, there came a canine growl.
The wolf pack slunk into the chapel with bright eyes and their tongues out like dogs. Their sides rose and fell sharply, as if they had been sprinting to get here, but they were calm now and fearless. At last Hannah let go and fell away from Leonard, crawling backwards towards Seb.
There were seven wolves, and they padded into the chapel in formation. For a moment Hannah remembered the Alsatian, and panicked that Leonard was somehow kin to these cruel animals, and that all of the predators of the world were in league with one another.
As if to prove her right, Leonard spluttered. He pawed at his neck with his hands and rolled onto his side groaning. Hannah saw his eyes open and squeeze shut again as he tried to make sense of where he was and what had just happened to him.
The lead wolf lodged its jaws around his throat while a second tore open the cloth of his shirt, spat it out then ripped wide his belly. The bite was so powerful that Hannah could see Leonard’s ribs raised like outstretched fingers. She didn’t know whether to watch or to screw up her eyes. Seb began shouting, and Hiroko started struggling at her bonds to no avail.
Leonard did not scream, probably because the first wolf had its teeth through his larynx. The worst part of it was that his arms and legs kept moving, long into the pack’s meal. Maybe he died quickly, when the first wolf opened his throat. Maybe those movements were all just electric afterthoughts. Or maybe it took longer, for the beasts made no further effort to still him. Two ravens sprang greedily down from the treetops, and croaked to one another like an elderly couple out for their walk.
When the wolves were done, the nearest looked up and met Hannah’s eyes.
Now it’s my turn, she thought, and turned her head to look at Seb. She tried to show strength for him, but he was too busy trying to do the same for Hiroko.
The wolf barked, as if to command Hannah’s attention, and she looked to it obediently. Its maw was smothered in Leonard’s blood, and the scarlet gore made its green eyes look all the greener. The wolf watched her with no readable expression, even as a red string of its slather dripped neatly to the chapel floor. There are no policemen and no judges now, thought Hannah, but here was a judge like no other. She became almost calm as she waited for its verdict.
It nodded to her and walked out of the chapel. The other wolves padded after it, licking their teeth as they went. Then the ravens bustled in.
It took Hannah some time to find any strength remaining. She was amazed, in the end, that she had enough to drag herself close to what remained of Leonard and find his knife. This she used to saw through the bonds at Hiroko’s wrists, after which she collapsed and let the girl take charge.
Hiroko freed herself and cut Seb loose while Hannah lay back on the stone and hurt all over, and looked up at a sky so blue above the branches. The ravens kept sneaking looks at her from their feast, perhaps wondering if she’d soon become their next meal.
‘I’m going to look for branches,’ said Hiroko. ‘Ones we can use as splints and crutches.’
The girl dashed off and left mother and son alone for a minute. Seb slipped his hand through Hannah’s, and their blood dried their palms together.
Hannah smiled at him. ‘Do you love her?’ she asked.
‘What?’
She giggled, before the giggle turned into a splutter of pain. ‘Do you love Hiroko?’
‘Are you really asking me this now?’
‘Good a time as any. Well? Do you?’
‘Yes,’ Seb said, with conviction.
When Hiroko returned, she helped Hannah get to her feet by means of a long stave of wood. Then she helped Seb with another crutch, and did her best to support them both as they flung their arms around her and tried to walk away from the chapel. It was agonisingly slow, but none of them could bear to stay in that place.
It was Michelle who found them, in the end, along with some of the kinder souls from the settlement. They gave Hannah and Seb water, and sat them down while they organised bandages and a sling, and stretchers to carry them back to the valley. Only when they were safely returned, and propped on bedding in Michelle’s more spacious shelter, did Hannah begin to ask about Adrien. She had expected to find him waiting for them in the valley, perhaps seated pensively on some stump or other, and although she would have been furious with him had he been so, that would have been better than his absence.
‘He must still be up there, in the woods,’ Hannah said urgently, ‘you’d better go back and look for him before it gets dark!’
Michelle shook her head. ‘Adrien isn’t up there. He came back this afternoon, and it’s because of him that we set out to find you.’
‘I don’t understand . . .’
‘He went into the ruined hotel. And now . . .’
Hannah propped herself up, just enough to look out through the shelter’s window. She could see nothing of the hotel besides a heap of bricks and broken trees.
‘It all fell down not long after I left him in there,’ said Michelle, with tears in her eyes. ‘I . . . don’t think he got out.’
Hannah could scarcely believe it. ‘What was he doing in there?’
‘He said he was going to follow the . . . he called them the . . .’
‘Whisperers,’ said Hannah, eyes widening, and at once she thought of the look the wolf had given her, and the hares and the sparrows and the fly that had preceded it. She remembered Adrien trying to explain what it was like to be a lichen, and she thought perhaps she understood some fraction of what had happened. ‘Oh, Adrien,’ she said, with a sad shake of her head. Then she added, almost without breath because her voice was cracking, ‘Thank you.’
19
Slingshot
The news of Leonard’s death spread quickly. Rumours flew as only rumours can: that Hiroko had dragged him out to the woods as he slept and there murdered him with his own rifle; that Hiroko and Seb had killed his dog and then him as part of some twisted act of nature worship; that Hiroko was a witch and Leonard her sacrifice. The girl didn’t care what people thought about her, although when Roland came to talk with them and demand the truth of the matter, she suspected he had been the one to start the rumours. He became flustered when Michelle calmly told him the true details of what had happened, but if he didn’t believe her he didn’t say. He looked smaller and more agitated without Leonard’s menace at his side.
They set Seb’s arm with sticks and made what compresses they could for the scalds along his leg, which came up in huge blisters big as toadstools. For several days he said hardly anything, and drank almost as much water as he sweated out again. Michelle kept apologising that the people of the settlement had already used all the painkillers from the hotel’s medical supply, but Seb bore the pain with the same determination he had shown after Hiroko had broken his nose. She was proud of him, and told him so with caresses.
As for Seb’s ankle, the cuts there were very deep and the worry was infection. Yet, to what seemed their great fortune, no poisonous bacteria took hold. Slowly his ankle began to heal, as did Hannah’s as she kept her weight off it. Neither Hannah’s ribs nor her pelvis were cracked, which she confided to Hiroko had been her great fear in the moment. Bruises bloomed as big as roses on her flesh, but after a week turned a sickly yellow and then faded.
Whenever she was not tending to Seb or Hannah, Hiroko wandered up into the forest. She found, however, that she no longer enjoyed being alone. Hunting was joyless without her partner in crime, and besides she had thrown her old slingshot into a river. The weapon had dropped from Leonard’s pocket in his tussle with Hannah, and so had avoided being on his person when the wolves set upon him. Although that had kept it clean, it might as well have been blood-stained every inch, as far as Hiroko was concerned. She had watched the river carry it away on frothing water and rubbed her shoulder where Leonard had shot her.
She had already found a fine fork of wood
to cut into a new catapult. Its fibres were the perfect union of the robust and the supple, and the grip was just the right thickness to grasp in her fist. Yet whenever she tried to work on it, to do as little as strim away the bark with her knife, she thought of her grandfather Yasuo whittling wood on the deck of his forest house, and the blade in her hand became as immovable as the dead.
Without the slingshot she had focused on trap-making. Remembering Ruth and her family by the lake, she had set about not only frog-catching but snail-farming, and had found an eager pupil in Michelle. The two of them rummaged in the debris of the hotel for bath tubs to use as their snail farm’s foundation. They found three, and lugged them clear of the ruins, but although they tried to laugh and joke about washing with invertebrates, Hiroko could tell that Michelle was thinking about Adrien, and praying not to find his body in the rubble. For her own part, the site of the hotel was doubly painful. If ever she pictured it falling, some cruel path of the mind led her to imagine the tower blocks of Tokyo. Then she’d screw up her fists so hard it felt like her knuckles would burst, just to stop herself from thinking of the city coming down.
‘I’ll make sure to fatten up these snails,’ Seb volunteered, once they had brought the bathtubs back to the settlement. ‘Until my ankle’s fixed, I’m doing everything at their pace anyway.’
‘Well, you’re in luck,’ said Michelle. ‘We found a grand old armchair in the hotel. It’s missing a leg, but we can prop it up on a stump for you.’
‘Great,’ said Seb with a clap of his hands, ‘I’ll sit in it and watch their every slither.’
Michelle, for her own part, was even more enthused by frog-trapping than Hiroko had been when she’d first discovered it. To her frustration, however, her efforts were met by little reward in the great barren trench of the valley. Worms were easy to come by in the mud, thick squirming red ones they hung from the handles of the buckets, but in the mornings they were limp and untaken and the traps remained empty of frogs. It was not until Hiroko roamed some distance west of the settlement that they had a breakthrough. She had gone where her boots had led her, notching the trees with her knife as she passed, and so had come to marshy land that burped with every footstep. There the creaks of bent and rotting willows were mimicked by frogs in the rushes, and on a lime-green cushion of algae Hiroko spied a giant, rotund female. Its blotch-marked skin and horn-rimmed eyebrows were a match even for Ruth’s Cleopatra, and Hiroko was almost trembling with concentration when she stalked towards it and, lightning fast, shot out her hands to imprison it in her grip.